The Overnight (27 page)

The desktop seems to be in no hurry to appear. Too many seconds elapse before the blank screen breaks out in rudimentary symbols that twitch and darken. A shiver passes through the surface under the glass as though it's wakening or about to waken, and Woody thinks he glimpses a similar disturbance on the security monitor; he almost thinks that the floor shifts underfoot too. If he's tired it's no wonder, though he'll never let his staff see it. He did manage to drowse intermittently in his office last night, and that's all he will need until tomorrow is over. He wouldn't be asking the team to stay up all night if he hadn't proved he could do it himself. He shuts his eyes for surely only a few moments, and when he looks again the screen is swarming with icons waiting to be called up.

He opens the staff list and blinks stickily at it. Aren't there too many names? The idea makes his eyes and brain feel hot and swollen until he notices that Ray has added Frank to the column and left Lorraine on it, where he supposes she'll have to remain for her parents to be paid her last salary cheque. Once Woody has convinced himself that there are no other lurking names he clicks on Gavin's to bring up his details. The store has both his mobile and his home number.

The mobile doesn't ring. Presumably it's out of power, unless Gavin has switched it off. Suppose he wasn't telling the truth and is actually catching up on his sleep at home? Woody lets that phone ring until he loses count of its repetitions, but there's no answer, not even from a machine. On the whole he hopes Gavin is on his way home: they can do without his infecting any of his colleagues with his yawns while everyone is bound to be susceptible to them or with his irrelevant preoccupations. If this means the rest of the team has to work harder, shouldn't that bring them closer together? They have all night to make up for his absence. Extra work is a small price to pay for an improved workforce without him or Lorraine or Wilf.

Woody is relinquishing the phone when he hears movement in the outer office. A glance at the grey figures ducking like animals to food tells him who it has to be. "Nigel," he calls.

"I'm here. I'm not there," Nigel's head says around the door as though it's making a joke of itself.

Woody's skin is growing clammy with the notion that Nigel has joined Gavin in causing confusion when he realises Nigel thinks the phone was being used to summon him. Woody waves it at him before hanging it up. "I've just spoken to Gavin," he tells Nigel. "Not trying any too hard to join us by the sound of it. Could be he'd rather stay home watching tapes."

"Why that in particular?"

"He tells me you gave him a couple of tapes to play with. I guess you forgot they're the property of the store."

"They were brought back faulty. You don't want anyone to take a look at them, then."

"I can do that at the video store if I think it's necessary. Why the expression? Don't you trust me?"

"I'm sure everybody has to. Why would you ask that? It's just you shouldn't load so much on yourself, if you'll allow me to say so." When Woody continues smiling Nigel withdraws, and Woody thinks he has backed off until Nigel enquires "Isn't that right, Ray? Don't you think Woody's attempting too much by himself?"

"I must say you're looking a bit stretched, Woody," Ray says, having appeared beside Nigel. "Do remember you've got us and Connie if you want to unload anything."

"There's plenty to unload," Woody says, feeling his smile widen. "Looks like there may be Gavin's stock as well as Lorraine's and Wilf's."

"We were thinking more of pressures of management," says Nigel.

"Were you? I was thinking of what's best for the store, and that's getting every book and video and compact disc downstairs and in order. Or do you expect me to do your share of that? I thought you just told me I'm doing enough as it is."

Ray and Nigel exchange glances that seem not to want Woody to notice them and that remind him of schoolboys obliged to stand outside the principal's office. "We can do it, can't we?" Nigel says to Ray. "Call it a match if you like. I'll shelve for the Scouse team if you will for the Manks."

Ray stares at him and makes his breath heard. "I never took you for the sporting type."

"That's a shade harsh, isn't it, Ray? We had cricket at my school, and I didn't let the side down."

"We're footballers, us lot from Manchester. We got a bit rougher and dirtier."

"Pardon me if I shouldn't have used the term I did. Mancunians, is that more the style?"

"You can use all the words you like, love. The main thing is now we know what you think."

Woody has no idea where any of this is coming from. "If you can't get rid of your differences maybe you can keep them out of the workplace."

At first they seem ready to prolong their disagreement, and then Nigel spins on his heel. Ray follows him and so, having shut down the computer, does Woody. Ray and Nigel are loading trolleys amid a thunder of books on wood. He finds a trolley by the elevator and fills it with armfuls of Gavin's books, then sends it down and has the exit to the sales floor open by the time the elevator arrives. As he parks in Wild Life, Jill strays over to ask "Did you manage to raise Gavin?"

"I tried both his numbers. Nobody at home and nothing at the other."

Woody has begun to sort the trolleyful as an indication that she should return to work when Agnes adds herself to the interrogation. "What's happened to Gavin?" she apparently thinks she's entitled to know.

"Jill? You're the one it seems to be an issue for."

"He rang in to say he was lost in the fog, and now are you saying his mobile's dead, Woody?"

"Someone ought to phone the police, shouldn't they, Jill? We don't know what could have happened to him."

"I would feel happier."

"Hey, getting your shelves right should do that for you. I thought you Brits were supposed to have your emotions under control. I wouldn't have expected you to want to send the cops to track down some guy who's just gotten turned around in the fog."

"Some guy," Agnes repeats. "That's all he means to you. That's how much the shop cares for the staff."

She's confronting him with a stare, and Jill has produced a somewhat sadder toned-down version. He's about to inform them that it depends how much the staff care about the store when the phones intervene. "Hey, maybe that's him now," Woody says as he makes for the nearest. "Maybe you summoned him."

Grasping the phone gives him back to himself. "Texts at Fenny Meadows," he takes pleasure in announcing. "Woody speaking."

"Thought for a moment there you were in Yankee land."

Is he meant to know the caller? The man sounds as if he expects to be recognised. "I'm where I'm supposed to be," Woody tells him. "I'm the manager."

"Brought you over to take charge, did they?" The man's local accent is growing flatter than ever, or his voice is. "Let's hope you can."

Woody is close to wondering aloud whether this is someone else who wants to undermine the store or him. Instead he says "May I help you?"

"Me, no, I shouldn't think. More like it's the other way round."

"Go ahead. We can always use input from our customers."

"I'm a bit more than one of them. You thought so, any rate," the man says with a pride that sounds ashamed to own up to itself. "You invited me there, or one of your crew did. Sorry I turned you down, but I'm glad."

"Should I know why? I believe I've read something of yours."

"That wouldn't tell you." Apparently he doesn't intend to either, since he asks "Is the feller there that was putting notices about? He stuck one on my car and dumped the rest in all the shops by you, as if that's going to do any good."

"Why shouldn't it?"

"Show a bit of sense, lad. Have you looked around you lately? I'd be surprised if you've got any customers at all."

"That's because the expressway's blocked just now."

"I forgot I shouldn't be expecting sense." Before Woody can deal with this, Bottomley—that's his name, Woody has remembered—says "Any road, is he available?"

Woody is gazing straight at Angus, but there's no question of letting him or any of the staff hear from the writer. "I'm afraid you'll have to leave a message."

"Tell him I must have sounded rude."

"I'm sure he'll know that without being told."

"Clever," says Bottomley in a tone that means the opposite. "What I'm driving at, I should have made myself clearer while I had the chance. That place was getting to me, and that's the truth."

"You must have to imagine all sorts of stuff to be a writer."

"That's the last spot I'd imagine anything. It's not the sort of book I wrote about it, is it?"

"I couldn't honestly say."

"There's plenty more like you. You're in the vast majority, no arguing with that." His pride has sunk to the level of resentment, and Woody is hoping his indifference has brought the call to an end until Bottomley says "I wanted the lad with the notices to know I wasn't trying to insult him."

It's only because Woody needs to learn all he can about the incident before confronting Angus that he asks "Why should he have thought you were?"

"I didn't mean he wasn't up to the job. I was saying just the contrary. You'll have got even more qualifications, won't you?"

Woody can't see the point of the question but is provoked to retort "A bunch."

"And you never noticed the mistake either."

Woody's furious to seem to be confirming this by saying "Which mistake?"

"Good God, have you not still? It's got to be worse than I reckoned. You didn't know there was a word wrong on your notices."

"Of course we did. We fixed it."

"Not on the ones you left round that place."

"Yes, those. There was a rogue apostrophe we got rid of."

"Lots of them about these days, but it wasn't one of those. I'm talking about how you said there was a readin group."

"Reading, you mean."

"You did, but it's not what your notices said."

Woody snatches one off the stack beside the phone and narrows his eyes at it. For a moment he's unable to locate the word—he could imagine he has forgotten how to read—and then the misprint swells into his vision as though he has rescued it from being submerged. His rage seems to make the floor quiver underfoot; no doubt that's how it feels to be so undermined. His fist is crumpling the leaflet into a hard spiky lump when Bottomley comments "Sounds like you've got it now."

"It'll be dealt with," Woody promises through his fiercest smile.

"How are you going to do that? If you're blaming anybody you've missed the point."

Woody knows he's going to dislike the answer but can't refrain from saying "Who else would you suggest I blame?"

"Try where you are."

"If you've any complaints about my store I'm listening."

"Not the shop." Bottomley fills a pause with a clink of glass and a generous amount of pouring before he says "That's another thing I could have been clearer about. He may have thought I meant the shop as well."

"I wasn't told you said anything about it."

"I expect he didn't think it was worth mentioning. He'd have thought I was asking where it got its name."

"Pretty obvious, I'd say."

"That would be, right enough, but I meant your business park."

Why should Woody care? The man's drunk and embittered and most unlikely to tell him anything he would like to hear. It's only in order to speed the conversation to its end that he says "What about it?"

"Haven't you Yanks got the word over there?"

"We have a whole bunch you don't. Which in particular?"

"You're losing it now. You're getting disputatious. You're starting to sound like your lad that couldn't see the mistake he was spreading about."

Woody flings the wad of paper into the nearest bin so as to stop bruising his palm. "Have you finished trying to be clearer?"

"Fair comment. I'm behaving like I'm there myself. Must be the drink." Nevertheless Woody hears him take one before asking "Would you call it fenny in the States?"

"I don't believe so, not where I come from. Why?"

"If it was a marsh."

"But it isn't."

The writer is silent long enough that Woody expects him to say more than "It was."

"When?"

"After they built a village there in the sixteen hundreds. If you believe the tales, after they did in the fourteen hundreds too."

In case he needs to be prepared to counter any of them Woody has to ask "What tales?"

"The one you can be sure of is how the second lot went mad. Supposed to have been from drinking bad water. By the time they'd finished fighting or whatever they did to one another there wasn't even a child left alive."

That's in his book, but Woody had almost succeeded in putting it out of his mind. He would wonder aloud if the story has been published anywhere else, except that there's something he doesn't understand. "So what are you saying happened to the first village?"

"Sank, and the other one too."

"You mean the land had to be drained. Why would they go to all that trouble to build a village in the middle of nowhere much?"

"They didn't have to. The land changed by itself."

"Hold on. I know it didn't have to be drained to build the retail park. You aren't telling me it drained itself twice."

"At least."

Is that in his book as well? It adds no credibility, and Woody is about to make this plain when Bottomley says "You got one thing right. It was nowhere much at all, so you'd wonder what led anyone to build on it."

"As far as the stores are concerned it's the expressway, obviously."

"That wouldn't be enough."

Not enough to justify the retail park? Woody can't see what else he could mean. The writer mustn't know much about business; maybe that's why his books have failed to sell. The fog can scarcely persist all year round, and once it lifts, the stores will come into their own—Texts will, anyway. Woody assumes the man is sinking deeper into the effects of his drink; he hasn't said anything that Woody needs to keep in mind or put in anyone else's. When Woody says "So are you through giving me your message?" he's smiling mostly at the joke.